The Toronto Raptors aren’t cool. They were cool, briefly, when Vince Carter was at the height of his flawed but still-indelible powers, but if you look over nearly two decades of this misbegotten NBA franchise, what you see is a team whose best players want out, whose success is threadbare, whose name is a joke. On its merits, too. As a famous rapper might say, they started from the bottom, and they never really left.

Well, the change is beginning. On Monday the Raptors will hold a press conference awarding the 2016 All-Star Game to Toronto. And as first reported by Cathal Kelly of The Toronto Star, the Raptors and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment will announce a partnership with Drake, the rapper/singer/former Degrassi cast member that will see him become a “global ambassador” for the team, a consultant, a business partner, what have you.

It’s not entirely clear what he will do — Jay-Z owned a tiny slice of the Brooklyn Nets, and served as their public face — but it will be an attempt to rebrand the Raptors. It will be an attempt to make them cool.

And in a vacuum, it will fail. Drake is a known commodity in the NBA, and that’s great. He has become Toronto’s most globally recognizable ambassador, though Rob Ford — who will be at the press conference Monday, and barring an arrest could still be the mayor when 2016 rolls around — has done his level best. Drake was in the club with the Miami Heat after they won the 2013 title; his lyrics are quoted by players on Twitter all the time.

In the best-case scenario Drake becomes the conduit from the Raptors to players who might be enticed to accept a trade to Toronto (possible), to sign here as a free agent (less likely), who might be susceptible to a personal sales pitch from someone whose work and fame they admire and respect. The theory out of New York is that general manager Glen Grunwald — the GM here during Vince’s heyday — was fired partly because he lacked that star power with superstars. Miami has Pat Riley, the godfather; the Lakers are the Lakers, if a diminished version since Dr. Jerry Buss died. William Wesley was a shadowy kingmaker in the league until he joined Creative Artists Agency, which is one of Hollywood’s mega agent shops.

Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press

And the NBA is a league of superstars, of machinations. The NBA is a lot like Hollywood: it matters who you know, how successful you are, how much power you wield. People want to be attached to a blockbuster; over the past four years LeBron James went from Cleveland to Miami, Chris Bosh went from Toronto to Miami, Carmelo Anthony went from Denver to New York, Dwight Howard has gone from Orlando to L.A. to Houston, and Chris Paul has gone from New Orleans to L.A. Oh, and Brooklyn raided Boston, and others. As one NBA executive lamented not long ago, “I swear, this league is 60% luck.”

So maybe Drake becomes a point of entry, which combined with Tim Leiweke’s connections to Hollywood — and hey, CAA, which is a force in the NBA — Toronto becomes something other than an outpost.

But alone, it’s window dressing, fizz. The All-Star Game won’t help much, either. It’s recently been held in New Orleans, in Orlando, in Atlanta, in Phoenix, after which their best players left. The All-Star Game is a billboard, but a blank billboard doesn’t do much good.

And that’s why despite the presence of Drake, Rob Ford, NBA commissioner-in-waiting Adam Silver and Leiweke at the press conference, the most important figure remains Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri, who has spent the summer quietly sitting on the competitive fence, the Andrea Bargnani trade notwithstanding. Ujiri is the guy who has to marshal his resources and decide how to remake this middling-at-best team. Having Drake as a public face and a back-channel operator could be helpful. Renaming the team the Huskies by 2015, which was discussed but which seems to be on the back burner, wouldn’t hurt. But unless Ujiri assembles talent that fits and produces, who cares whether Drake is selling a team with one best-of-five playoff win in 20 years?

So great, Drake will be associated with the team; hey, maybe there’s room for Justin Bieber, too, to entice the even younger generation. The Raptors will put up billboards, and they will be shiny and bright. And it won’t matter a bit if they don’t have anything to sell.

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